I have had a new short story published by the fine folks over at BULL, which is immensely gratifying. This means I have been publishing short stories for twenty years now, a duration of time difficult to contemplate. It’s hard to understand that I am twenty years older much less that I have been doing a single artistic activity, however haphazardly, for that long.
Twenty years ago I imagined I would still be writing short stories in middle age, but I also imagined I would be writing other pieces, different pieces, longer pieces, glossier pieces. Like everyone on the planet, I imagined I would end up in a much different place than I have currently ended up, but I won’t dwell on imagined destinations too long for fear of whining and self-pity.
When I was younger and was in writer school, we of course wrote short stories, mostly out of pedagogical convenience. It strikes me that almost all of the aesthetic statements you can make about short stories simply come from the fact that they are in fact shorter than other forms. It’s that simple and that complicated. This lends the notion that you graduate from stories, but I never graduated, and now I don’t think that one does graduate. Of course, if you prefer different modes of writing, different lengths, you do those, and while there are a couple of other modes that I have attempted, I maintain a fondness and comfort with the short story, a devotion to it. Essays and nonfiction are enjoyable but difficult; their lack of structure, a common-practice conception (even by the non-literary) of what an essay is, means that one must almost re-define the mode’s limits each time one writes a new piece. You have to establish the terms of engagement. Whereas everyone, or almost everyone, thinks they know what a story is. And while you, the writer, might not wish to write according to those generally held conceptions, you can then write against them, or bob and weave around them. Everyone’s purported understanding is a useful net to hit your literary ball over. This is also different from poetry, where the only remaining net is perhaps the convention of line breaks. The problem with poetry is that currently it’s only read and practiced by the True Heads. And the Heads always have their own language; that’s how you prove you’re a Head. Plus with nonfiction there is the autobiographical element, how much personal information to include, if any. Nicholson Baker once talked about the protective moat of fictionality. And Lorrie Moore has talked about the necessary re-cooking of fiction writing. The ingredients change once the burners get going. It seems like people lose the joy of make believe as they get older. I can feel it in me, the middle-aged desire to start reading military history or some such, and I have to fight against it. I have to remind myself to imagine the What If and not content myself in the What Was.
I have written two complete novels, both still unpublished, and both drove me crazy. Writing a novel is like cleaning a house where each morning there is yet another room that didn’t exist the night before, an endless mansion proliferation of furniture polishing. Stories are one room, perhaps a little pinched, perhaps over-furnished, but with knowable dimensions. Novels seem to be about time, the time depicted within them as well as the time spent reading them and writing them. Whereas short stories maintain a brevity of spirit like a song or a sprint; you can always see the end, imagine it, feel it coming; the end is baked in the beginning, a hint of cardamom. And they are more lifelike in that life is only understood briefly, in refracted glimpses, not in long comprehensible stretches.
Now, I imagine I will keep writing stories for the next twenty years. Everything else I’m not so sure. I don’t know if the stories will be any good, and I don’t know if I will be able to get them published, but I know at least that it’s an act I can actually accomplish — sporadically, sometimes sloppily, sometimes less than my desired abilities. But I can do it. There’s comfort in running still.